Lovesick Blues Read online

  And so it went during the early months of ’52, with more lows than highs. Caught in the middle of the caterwauling between Hank and Audrey, or at least having a ringside seat as the drama unfolded, were the surviving members of the Original Carter Family. Eck and Mother Maybelle Carter and their beautiful singing daughters, Helen and June and Anita, were the most revered members of the Opry—the First Family, as it were, sturdy country people whose recordings in 1927 had opened the doors for the commercialization of country music—and they were at once appalled and mesmerized by Hank. He had latched on to them early in his Nashville days, admiring their music and their familial ways, as though he wanted them to be his surrogate family. He was a regular visitor at their house, hunkering over plates of homemade biscuits and gravy or spooning from bowls of corn bread crumbled in milk, like a whimpering dog that had come in from the rain. Maybelle was the mother he wished he’d had, firm but nonjudgmental, and he called her “Mama.”

  Hank had developed a fixation on the prettiest of the daughters, Anita, a tall brunette with a classic Appalachian soprano voice. Only a teenager, probably a virgin, and certainly one who had never even tasted whiskey, she didn’t quite know what to make of his advances. On the night Hank introduced “Cold, Cold Heart” at the Opry, she had stood offstage with tears streaming down her face (“I thought it was the saddest and most beautiful thing I’d ever heard”), and when Hank asked her out on a date she said yes, but only if the whole family could go along, which they did. He was still in hot pursuit in April of ’52 when he and the Carters went to New York to appear on Kate Smith’s network television show. (Hank and Anita’s duet of “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You” is the single greatest piece of film of Hank in his prime.) Hank had given Anita a ring and said he would take her anywhere she wanted to go in New York. When the girl from the Clinch Mountains of Virginia said she had always wanted to hear Peggy Lee sing at the Copacabana, off they went. Lee happened to be singing one of Hank’s songs when they walked in, and soon the two were on the dance floor, Hank embarrassing Anita by kicking his bony knees waist-high, doing the Texas Two-Step. The sophisticated New Yorkers in the crowd were having a good laugh and could hardly believe it when Lee introduced the skeletal hillbilly in the gray double-breasted suit as the great Hank Williams.

  Nothing came of the romance, but the Carters weren’t rid of Hank. As the divorce proceedings continued between their friends, they bore the brunt of his jealousies and antagonisms toward Audrey—drunkenly calling Anita in the middle of the night for commiseration, crying on Maybelle’s shoulder, once even trying to ram a car he thought held Audrey and June—and June, especially, tried to shame him on moral grounds. Her greatest contribution to American music, after all, would be to extend the life of another tortured wastrel, Johnny Cash, during the thirty-five years of their fabled marriage. The last straw came when June, trying to mediate a fight between Hank and Audrey, literally got caught in the line of fire: in the driveway of the house on Franklin Road, a drunken Hank fired a pistol at Audrey but missed June’s head by six inches, temporarily deafening her and dropping her to the ground out of sheer fright. “You’ve killed June! You’ve killed June!” Audrey shouted, and Hank’s response was to jump into his car and speed away. His distraught apology to June a week later did little good. “I realized he really was crazy,” June said. “We knew he was going to die, and he was going to die soon.”

  He had managed to avoid trouble during the trip to New York, partly by staying in his guarded room at the Hotel Astor on Times Square and composing the lyrics for a song that would never be published or recorded, “You’ll Never Again Be Mine.” For obvious reasons, New York City wasn’t his kind of place, any more than the next stop on his calendar, the West Coast. He had flown out for some dates in California, and since he was there it was time to finalize the deal with MGM Pictures. (Fred Rose’s son Wesley was with Hank that next spring when he threw his boots on Dore Schary’s desk to completely blow off any chances he would ever have to make motion pictures.) He had warmed up for that dreaded meeting with a few belts of whiskey, and by the time he was to headline a show in San Diego a couple of days later he was drunk again. Minnie Pearl was a part of the troupe, and she remembered how when Hank messed up on the first show she and some others were asked to drive him around during intermission in hopes of sobering him up: “We started singing. He was all hunkered down, looking out of the side of the car, singing, ‘I Saw the Light,’ and then he stopped and he turned around, and his face broke up and he said, ‘Minnie, I don’t see no light. There ain’t no light.’ ”

  The other California, the Bay Area, was more to his liking, especially Oakland with its surrounding blue-collar towns populated by southern expatriates who had come to work the factories during the Second World War. He was booked into several classic roadhouses in the area, and on the day of his checking in to a hotel in Oakland he was met by one of the few big-city reporters who would ever interview him. Ralph J. Gleason was with the San Francisco Chronicle and years later would recount the meeting for Rolling Stone: “Hank Williams came out of the bathroom carrying a glass of water. He was lean, slightly stooped over, and low-jawed. He shook hands quickly, then went over to the top of the bureau, swept off a handful of pills and deftly dropped them, one at a time, with short, expert slugs from the glass.” Gleason admitted knowing little about country music, which Hank was calling “folk” music at the time (“When a folk singer sings a sad song, he’s sad”), only that Hank “wrote good songs” and had gotten rich from it. They repaired to the hotel coffee shop to continue the interview over breakfast. Hank revealed little that we don’t know now; telling Gleason about south Alabama and “this old Nigrah” named Tee-Tot, about WSFA and getting paid ninety dollars for cutting four sides in his first recording session with Sterling, and about the Opry. Acuff was his idol, he said, Fred Rose his inspiration, and he really liked the way Johnny Ray belted out “Cry.”

  That night, at seedy San Pablo Hall, about thirty miles north of downtown Oakland, Hank was in his element. “You parked in the mud and walked past a tree up to the door” of a white one-story cinderblock building, Gleason wrote, “and inside there was a long room with a bandstand at one end and a bar in an annex at one side.” It was Thigpen’s Log Cabin all over again. The beer and whiskey flowed and the people danced until Hank sang. “There were lots of those blondes you see at C&W affairs, the kind of hair that Mother never had and nature never grew and the tight skirts that won’t quit and the guys looking barbershop-neat but still with a touch of dust on them.” This newcomer to the music could see that Hank “had that thing. He made them scream when he sang [as though they had been] shipped right up from Enid or Wichita Falls,” and he sang everything he knew. By intermission, Hank “was a little stoned and didn’t seem to remember our conversation earlier in the day and the party was beginning to get a little rough,” so Gleason left. Six months later, reading of Hank’s death, he remembered his passionate singing—“He didn’t cry but he made you cry, and when he sang ‘Lovesick Blues’ you knew he meant it”—and his dream to retire to his farm and “watch them cattle work while I write songs and fish.”

  The road was getting longer and harder as the Opry tried mightily to capitalize on its biggest star—from California he went to Boston’s Symphony Hall, to Canada, and to Texas—until, finally, he was booked into Las Vegas, not without a great deal of trepidation on all sides. Hank? In Vegas? Please. It was an ill-advised venture, on many counts. Then, as now, the successful Vegas acts are the ones that can offer painless entertainment—showgirls, stand-up comics, Wayne Newton, Elvis—not some brokenhearted hillbilly poet who will divert the high-rollers from their drinking, gambling, and womanizing. By now the chances were down to fifty-fifty that Hank would be sober. He was scheduled for two weeks at the Last Frontier, fronting for an old vaudevillian. Hank had managed to hire Don Helms and Jerry Rivers for the gig, and the Opry’s Jim Denny ordered them to drive Hank all the w
ay from Nashville to Vegas and to hire minders to guard him around the clock once they got there. It was a disaster from beginning to end—Hank didn’t like seeing a sea of dressed-up patrons in the audience any more than they liked what they were seeing and hearing on the stage—and the show was canceled after one week. “The closer we got to Vegas, the more nervous he became,” Helms said of the drive out, and when Hank learned of the cancellation, “I could see a sigh of relief come over him.” The only people who had enjoyed it were the random ranchers and fans of country and western, virtual strangers to nightclubs, who tended to nurse a beer through the show and bypass the gaming tables on their way out. Hank began drinking the minute he was fired, and he got seriously wasted in the backseat of the limo while Helms and Rivers took turns at the wheel on the long drive across the country through the blazing summer sun. At least when he got home he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Audrey.

  Everything else might be collapsing around him, but there was always the studio: his haven, his comforter, increasingly the only place where he felt truly at home and safe from the monsters that haunted him. No matter what, through hell and high water, nearly every record he cut now was hitting the charts—most recently “Baby, We’re Really in Love,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “Half as Much,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’ ”—and on a Friday the thirteenth in June he was back at Castle Studio, for the first time in six months, to record four more records that would join the Hank Williams canon. Only “Jambalaya” was truly Hank’s concoction, with a lot of help on the patois from his Cajun friends, but the others certainly were tailored for him. “Window Shopping,” a lighthearted lament (“you’re only shopping for love”), had been written by a French-born newspaper artist in New York; the songwriting credits of “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” were shared by Fred Rose and a friend who, incidentally, had introduced him to Christian Science; and Hank split the credits with Fred for writing “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” The latter was the final cut of the afternoon, at the end of a three-hour session, and Hank was so weak that he had to take a seat in a chair between the many takes required to finally get it right. Whatever the circumstances, “Jambalaya” would turn out to be the biggest commercial hit of his career.

  It was on the next night, at the Opry, that he met the woman he determined would become his second wife. A promising singer from the Louisiana Hayride, Faron Young, was making a guest appearance and was accompanied by a curvaceous teenaged beauty with flaming red hair and bounteous breasts. Hank’s eyes popped out when he saw her sitting in the backstage glass cubicle reserved for guests of the performers, wearing a tight-fitting off-the-shoulder dress revealing Gibson Girl cleavage he could only dream of, and he homed in on her. She was Billie Jean Jones, from Shreveport, currently Young’s girlfriend, and she called Hank “sir” when he began making his inquiries. Smitten, Hank summoned Young to the cubicle and asked what his intentions were. “She’s got too many boyfriends, Hank. I can’t keep up with her,” Young told him. Hank pointed out a beauty on the front row, “that ol’ black-haired gal in the front row with the red dress on,” a groupie who had come all the way from Pennsylvania to be with him, and proposed that they switch women for a night on the town after the show. When they reached a nightclub, Billie Jean wouldn’t go inside—she didn’t drink, she said, was tired from traveling all day, and she wasn’t so naïve that she didn’t know of Hank’s reputation—and so the two of them stayed in Faron’s car and talked. He found out she had a child, was separated from the father, lived with her parents, and was working as a telephone operator for the phone company in Shreveport. And this: she said that when Hank and Audrey had a house in Bossier City in ’49, during his Hayride days, she lived four doors away and always told her mother she was going to marry Hank Williams someday.

  Oh, the women in his life! Any day now he expected to hear the word that his marriage to Audrey was officially over. He had just learned that he had impregnated a comely young woman named Bobbie Jett, a dancer-cum-secretary known well around music circles in Nashville, and he couldn’t get rid of her. Now he thought he was in love again, with Billie Jean. Between that and the drinking and the incessant back pain, his life was becoming more unmanageable by the day. The house he was renting had become a magnet for has-beens and wannabes—Party Time!—a place where the booze flowed, women ran amok, and songs were sung; where Hank, always afraid of being alone, would sit on the floor in the middle of the traffic, glumly pretending to write songs. It got so bad that Ray Price, living in the upstairs quarters, packed up his stuff and moved out. Concerned that this time Hank really was intent on drinking himself to death, Price and Don Helms had the people from the Madison sanitarium come to sedate him and drag him away to the dreaded “huts” for his own protection.

  The divorce became final on July 10. Because he had contested little in the preliminary agreements, in the futile hope that Audrey might back out at the last minute, Hank got burned. Audrey would get half of his future earnings, the house on Franklin Road, $1,000 in cash, her Cadillac convertible, and custody of three-year-old “Bocephus,” Hank, Jr. Hank paid her attorney’s fees, was ordered to pay for his son’s support until he turned twenty-one, and got only the failing store downtown and the forsaken farm in Franklin. There was no savings account to be divided. Even so, it was a gamble on Audrey’s part because no one had any way of knowing for sure what “future royalties” there would be, given the rate of Hank’s decline; and if she ever remarried she would lose all claims to any royalties and be reduced to receiving basic child support.

  To no one’s surprise, Hank charged into the studio on the very next afternoon and came out firing the only way he knew how. He cut four sides in only two hours, two of them “Luke the Drifter” recitations, and was out of there with an hour left of paid-up studio time. The material might have been maudlin in any other performer’s hands, but not when it was Hank Williams reading from his notes as though to say Here’s what the bitch done to me. First out of the box came “You Win Again,” arguably the saddest lament he ever wrote (“You have no heart, you have no shame. . . .”), with knowing nods in the studio from his pals Jerry Rivers and Don Helms, who had lived through it all with Hank. Then came a decidedly un-Hank tune called “I Won’t Be Home No More,” a jaunty in-your-face good-bye in which he seemed to be shooting his middle finger to Audrey: “I used to be the patient kind, believed each alibi / but that’s all done, I’ve changed my mind, I’ve got new fish to fry. . . .” As Luke the Drifter, he intoned someone else’s lyrics in “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw,” a defiant response to the swelling ranks of fans and bookers clucking about his wayward ways; and then ended the session with a point-blank shot at Audrey in “Please Make Up Your Mind”: “My life with you has been one hard knock / Lord, my head looks like an old chop block. . . .” He would see Castle Studio only one more time.

  At the Opry, the very next night, Hank’s mood was almost carefree, as though he had finally gotten rid of some bad juices. The interplay between him and Red Foley, the emcee of the networked Prince Albert tobacco portion, was downright jocular. “I got a brand-new song that ain’t never been aired,” said Hank. “Ain’t never been aired?” Foley said, following the rehearsed script. “No, and it might need airin’.” That Hank, ain’t he something? The people who were crammed into the Ryman, trying to stir the air of a stultifying July night with their funeral-parlor fans, howled at Hank’s droll backwoods humor and wiggled into their slick church-pew seats. “It’s ‘Jam-bal-eye-oh on the Beye-oh. ’ ” Then, on one of the last nights he would ever play the Opry, Hank waited for the upbeat intro from Don Helms’s steel guitar before jumping into the tune that had been laying ’em out all over Louisiana and Texas—“Good-bye, Joe, me gotta go . . .”—and if he didn’t get the same tumultuous reaction as he had in his Opry debut with “Lovesick Blues” it was close. Nobody knew it at the time, and Hank wasn’t done quite yet, but it was just about over. That musty old tab
ernacle, the Mother Church of Country Music, would never see anything like him again.

  On a Monday in early August, into his cups, Hank sat in his house and pondered his latest mess. He thought he had successfully wooed Billie Jean—she had taken a room in a boardinghouse in Nashville and gone to work for the Nashville phone company, he had ridden with her to meet her parents in Shreveport, and they had agreed to marry sometime in October—but she had gotten enough of his drinking and his women (“I ain’t putting up with this crap no more”) and gone back home to Louisiana. Bobbie Jett was still coming around, now beginning to show her pregnancy, and he felt guilty over that. Audrey was refusing to let him see Hank, Jr. Hank and Audrey’s Corral and the farm near Franklin were the last things on his mind. He didn’t even have a car, having somehow “lost” a Cadillac. Since that last appearance on the Opry a month earlier, when he performed “Jambalaya,” he had missed so many radio shows and tour dates that WSM’s Jim Denny had warned him that it was all he could do to keep the station from firing him.

  When the phone rang that morning, August 11, Denny was on the line. Hank had failed to appear at the Opry the Saturday night before and at a show the following day—the last straw—and that was it. He was fired. “You can’t fire me, ’cause I already quit,” Hank said. Denny told Hank this was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, and held out some hope: “Call me in December, and I’ll let you know about coming back to the Opry next year.” Johnnie Wright, Kitty Wells’s husband, happened to be there with Hank, and Denny told Wright to bring him by the station so he could pick up a last check, for about $300. With the word of Hank’s dismissal spreading like a brushfire—Don Helms and his wife, Hazel, close friends since the war years, rushed over to return a watch and a shotgun they had been holding and to say good-bye—Hank and Wright began loading up Johnnie’s borrowed Chrysler limousine. They took the jump seat out of the limo and replaced it with a recliner from the house, and hitched up the little aluminum trailer with Hank Williams & the Drifting Cowboys painted on the side. Johnnie driving, Hank riding in the recliner like a deposed king, they ran by WSM to get the check. “Pull in there and get me some whiskey,” Hank said when he saw a liquor store on Broadway, so Wright went inside to get the check cashed and buy a fifth. “Hank out there?” said the clerk. A small knot of people had gathered outside, attracted by the limo pulling Hank’s trailer, and they were the last people in Nashville to say farewell to the drifting cowboy.